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Anne Truitt

Drawings

Press Release

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Anne Truitt: Drawings, the next exhibition in his gallery at 523 West 24th Street.

This retrospective of Truitt’s works on paper spans the four decades of her career. The 40 works on view date from the early 1960s, when she first developed the totemic sculptures in painted wood for which she is best known, to the last years of her life. Many works are being shown for the first time.

Drawing was a daily ritual for Anne Truitt (1921-2004). The works in the exhibition include the full range of her drawing techniques including graphite, ink, pastel, and acrylic on paper. Edges are variously taped, rolled, and sliced. Line is sometimes bold, and at other times subtle enough to appear at first glance almost invisible. A 1966 series of distilled, hard-edge forms evoke the architecture of Truitt’s childhood home with its white clapboard siding and picket fence. In a group of works from 1976, paint is applied in layers of subtle color, a signature of her work in all media.

A fully illustrated hardcover book, with an essay by Brenda Richardson, will be published to accompany the exhibition.

Anne Truitt was born in Baltimore and lived the majority of her life in Washington, D.C. Her first one-person exhibition was at the Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, in February 1963. Her work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1973); the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1974); and the Baltimore Museum of Art (1974 & 1992). In 2009, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., organized an acclaimed retrospective of her work. Truitt was also a distinguished writer and published three volumes of her memoirs, Daybook (Pantheon, 1982), Turn (Viking Penguin Press, 1986), and Prospect (Penguin, 1996).

Anne Truitt: Drawings will be on view from February 4 through April 14, 2012, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM at 523 West 24th Street.